Storyteller

Becky Bondurant earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from George Mason University where she studied fiction under NPR’s Alan Cheuse. Since that time, she has served as a writing and communications teacher on the high school and college level in schools throughout Virginia and has led study abroad trips to Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Denmark. After moving back to Norfolk, VA from Richmond to be closer to her roots, she enrolled in virtual storytelling classes with New York City monologist Mike Daisey. These bi-weekly meetings, which continued for more than two years (and still continue), revealed that extemporaneous oral narrative was the right medium for Bondurant’s work about the body, ritual, and the relationship between individual and community. Informed by her experiences as a parent, a teacher, a queer, a student of literature, a Joycean, and a former Catholic, Becky’s stories unravel extemporaneously, undressing taboo topics like sex, age, weight, othering, power, ritual, and death in a voice that is as raunchy and irreverent as it is philosophical and poetic.